... corrections of thoughts ...

... er... i think there have been quite misunderstanding from my last blog, especially to nong nong.

Erm... I'm not sure if you were thinking I could just graduate with that one paper I got published. It's not that na. This is just an extra work from the full dissertation. A MUST for Ph.D. graduate is the dissertation that contains your original thoughts on research work. To my best knowledge, speaking of disseration, there are a few types.

1) the book style that contains several chapters speaking ellaborating the one main theme you want to convey.

2) the combination of journal publications from the similar topics and bind them together with introduction and summary chapters to make all goes in the same flow.

For Japanese univesities, they rely heavily on journal publication. To be able to file for graduation request, you need to have a certain number of journal publication along side your dissertation. This number varies from department to department, from professor to professor.
If you talk to P'P' in the scientific area and you hear them say 3 papers, it usually means they need to publish 3 journal papers and they can bind them in a dissertation in (2) style and file for graduation request (and usually can graduate without problems).

For my case, according to the graduation guideline from my department, I need to have my dissertation + ONE journal paper which if not already published, the manuscript needed to be accepted for publication. That was why I was so happy I got my paper accepted and counted toward graduation requirement. I KNEW even with that, I still need to write my dissertation -- not yet being able to graduate der~.

I thought further that I could write my dissertation like the way P'P' can, i.e. focusing on writing 2 more papers and bind them together, then I will be done. But no, I was told I cannot. I need to go with (1) style and not with (2). And on top of that, my professor prefers us to write THREE journal papers. So meaning that the workload I estimated was not totally right. I found out later from my senpai that ONE of the three journal papers MUST BE in Japanese! So there!

I understood absolutely well why I need to get all these works done for graduation requirement though. Things in social science aren't quite relying on facts like scientific stuff. So thoughts on the same topics vary from people to people. If you go up defending your paper without a backup of any publication, you leave your paper quite a large loophole to be attacked and there is a high chance you will not be able to graduate. So the journal paper will help give your paper strength, to confirm it is something widely accepted as contributions to current researches. Of course, three papers speak better than one. And my professor gives a further sight on graduates' chance of finding jobs in Japan. For foreign students, he encourages us to write a paper in Japanese, so we would be able to say that we have some proficiency in using Japanese. Plus, if we do researches in English and in the field not necessarily related to Japan, then the question of why we need to be in Japan will appear. So yes, all the required works have explanation in themselves. I don't have objections to that. Just that all these are out of required elements I prepared for. (อุตส่าห์เช็คมาอย่างดีกับระเบียบของคณะ... อาจารย์ดั๊นนนไม่ตามคณะอีก แต่ถ้าให้เลือกก็ทำตามอาจารย์อยู่ดี เพราะว่าถ้าไม่ทำเนี่ยะ.. โอกาสเจออะไรแบบตอนดีเฟนด์ธีสิสป.โทอีกทีก็มีเยอะมากๆ ไม่เอาอ่ะ.. เจอครั้งนั้นครั้งเดียวพอละ)

Anyways, I think things will be alright. It was like a shock to me when I first heard about it. Now I think I'm coping with it alright and starting to have a clearer picture of which path I need to follow. So now that we all know my requirements, let's wait and see how I can accomplish them together. :)